Elizabeth Bellamy, the Lady of Bellamy Bridge

Elizabeth Bellamy is one of the best-known ghosts of Florida’s Panhandle, and her story is a good example of a legend that has outgrown the person. According to historian Dale Cox, she was a real young woman, wife of Dr. Samuel C. Bellamy, a local politician in Jackson County; she died in 1837 at about eighteen. She was buried in a small grove beside the Chipola River near where the bridge now stands. Sources give 1840 or 1851 for the first wooden bridge at the crossing; the present steel-frame bridge dates from 1914 and stayed in use until 1963, when a concrete bridge replaced it.

The popular version is more dramatic: she is said to have been a bride whose gown caught fire from a candle or fireplace at her wedding reception, died of her burns a few days later and now wanders the swamp near the bridge looking for her husband, appearing at midnight to those who wait. Cox, who has researched the legend for years, has said much of this is myth. In his telling she did not die that way; the burning-bride incident is recorded as having happened in Georgia, and he links the romantic elements to Caroline Hentz’s nineteenth-century novel Marcus Warland. He believes she probably died of a fever such as malaria or yellow fever. Sources disagree on the date of the wedding and the cause of death.

People who tell the story report a pale form of a young woman in white, a misty shadow and strange blue-and-white lights over the water. Cox has described a night on one of his tours when a blue figure appeared in the fog over the bridge. He is also careful to say that the existence of such sightings neither proves nor disproves a ghost. Dr. Bellamy is said by some tellers to have mourned for years and to have died elsewhere, away from her grave; sources do not agree on the details, and none are needed here.

The Bellamy Bridge Heritage Trail lets visitors walk about half a mile through the swamp forest in daylight. It is a protected natural and historic site, and the grave and surrounding land are worth treating with the same respect owed to any burial ground.

A pale figure of a young woman in white, a misty shadow and blue-and-white lights near the bridge and the Chipola River swamp, reported by visitors and local officials.

The abandoned iron bridge and the swamp along the Chipola River in Jackson County, reached by a walking trail; sightings are said to occur at night.

The legend is one of Florida’s most often-told ghost stories in travel features, local television and Dale Cox’s writing and haunted-history tours.